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New York Rep. Elise Stefanik’s recent publication, Poisoned Ivies: The Inside Account of the Academic and Moral Rot at America’s Elite Universities, truly serves as a historical snapshot. Through this literary endeavor, Stefanik evidently sought to solidify her political prominence—specifically, the instance in late 2023 when she posed a direct yes-or-no query to the presidents of Harvard, MIT, and Penn during a congressional session on campus antisemitism, to which their responses proved catastrophic—transforming it into a stepping stone for her political ambitions. Poisoned Ivies details how, on the hearing day, Stefanik embodied the legislative equivalent of Michael Jordan’s legendary flu game; despite her illness, she reported for duty, “equipped with Kleenex, cough drops, and drenched in over-the-counter cold medicine.” Stefanik vividly portrays her indecision about accepting a colleague’s offer to cede their time: “The query that resonated globally nearly never occurred.” Unsurprisingly, the book also incorporates the hearing’s cultural impact, including its appearance on Saturday Night Live—though Stefanik labels the resulting skit, which satirized her alongside university leaders Claudine Gay, Sally Kornbluth, and Liz Magill, as “the worst cold open ever,” its inclusion is certainly noteworthy.
It’s therefore ironic that the political trajectory Stefanik aimed to bolster by chronicling the campus political conflicts of 2023/2024 in her book appears to have abruptly stalled. This former moderate Republican and Harvard alumna (’06) had fully embraced the MAGA movement by the time of the Joe Biden administration, issuing multiple declarations supporting Donald Trump’s assertions of a “stolen” 2020 election. Following the 2023 campus antisemitism hearings that elevated her profile, and with Trump’s return to office in 2024, he seemingly repaid her loyalty by appointing her as ambassador to the United Nations in early 2025. However, the remainder of last year saw a downturn: Trump withdrew Stefanik’s ambassadorship nomination, citing concerns about losing her congressional seat in a special election. Subsequently, the president chose not to back her bid for the Republican gubernatorial nomination in New York state. By December of last year, only two years after the hearings that landed her on SNL, Stefanik declared she was halting her gubernatorial campaign and would depart Congress at the close of her term in 2026. She intends to dedicate time to her 4-year-old son; despite her youth and probable future return to public service, she has yet to indicate such plans, even to a sympathetic interviewer recently featured in the Wall Street Journal.
Rather than seeking insights into Stefanik’s future within this volume, one might perceive Poisoned Ivies as an alternative reality: a depiction of post-Oct. 7 campus events that conspicuously omits any mention of happenings in Gaza, portrays Jewish campus reactions without acknowledging the numerous Jewish students and faculty who openly opposed the conflict, and (as a particularly striking example) narrates the takeover of Hamilton Hall at Columbia without recounting the story of Hind Rajab, in whose honor the occupants renamed the edifice.
Claudine Gay’s well-known reply to Stefanik’s inquiry during those hearings—Stefanik asked: “Does advocating for the genocide of Jews infringe upon your university’s code of conduct?”; Gay responded: “It hinges on the context”—is featured repeatedly throughout the book, both as an epigraph and as the concluding statement. (“Truth and clarity shall prevail. It is not contingent on context.”) Upon Gay’s departure, A.O. Scott for the Times characterized that particular phrase as “a deliberate, impartial piece of language that many found offensive for precisely its neutrality: an effort at calming rhetoric that yielded the inverse result.” I acknowledge that I am falling into Stefanik’s deliberate rhetorical snare by highlighting that the central deficiency of Poisoned Ivies is its absence of context. However, perusing Poisoned Ivies makes it evident that if one recounts the narrative of campus demonstrations following Oct. 7 without any mention of Gaza, then the demonstrators, their faculty supporters, and the administrators grappling with how to react, all appear utterly baffling—at best, antisemitic; potentially even demon-possessed.
This is intentional. The book references numerous conservative publications and social media personalities that extensively covered campus politics during the peak of the protests: the New York Post, Tablet magazine, Bill Ackman, City Journal, the Free Press, the Heritage Foundation, and Canary Mission. Engaging with it evokes the sensation of scrolling through right-wing X feeds in the spring of 2024. While there are ample genuine instances of rhetorical excesses from pro-Palestinian campus organizations to cite, and Stefanik certainly highlights these, she doesn’t stop there. She interweaves these examples with uncritically presented accounts of campus antisemitism that, while vivid to anyone online at the time, appear less substantiated upon reflection. For instance, Eyal Yakoby, a Penn student whom (Stefanik states) “has courageously confronted and documented antisemitism on Penn’s campus since October 7,” saw his lawsuit against Penn dismissed by a federal judge last year. Former Columbia professor Shai Davidai, who faced an investigation by Columbia for alleged harassment and doxing of student activists and faculty, is described by Stefanik as a “liberal” advocating a two-state solution who denies any wrongdoing. However, that investigation was closed after Davidai’s departure from Columbia in the summer of 2025, terminating his employee status. Stefanik also details how Sahar Tartak, a Yale undergraduate, reported being “jabbed in the face” with a Palestinian flag during a protest—“fortunately, she sustained no lasting eye damage,” Stefanik notes. Yet, viewing the video of this alleged “jabbing” makes it considerably ambiguous whether that indeed occurred. As the New York Times corrected a Bret Stephens column from April 2024 on Tartak’s account: “A video of the incident shows a flag hit her face; it does not clearly show that a demonstrator jammed a flag in her eye.”
In a more nuanced instance of simplification, Stefanik commends the “patriotic frat boys” who prevented activists from substituting an American flag with a Palestinian one at the University of North Carolina, subsequently reinstating the Stars and Stripes and safeguarding it from further tampering. Stefanik’s commendation omits the fact that some fraternity members on other campuses provoked pro-Palestine demonstrators with derogatory and racist chants—or that certain UNC fraternity members later conveyed to the media their displeasure at being elevated to heroic status by conservatives engaging in national culture wars. “Portraying our actions to foster a story that we were right-wing, MAGA champions has been a severe distortion and disrespectful to many of those genuinely present,” one individual stated to the Times in September 2024, following an online fundraising effort by right-wing groups that generated hundreds of thousands of dollars for a celebratory “rager” for the students.
Stefanik commends her own role in initiating the “transformational shift” in the dynamic between the federal government and academic institutions that commenced during the initial year of Trump’s second term. She asserts, “Our hearing fundamentally altered the trajectory of American higher education.” This claim might hold some validity, though Trump, who is disinclined to share recognition, might find it irritating. Nevertheless, circumstances appear different in 2026 compared to 2024, and developments rarely follow a predictable path. In the period preceding the release of Poisoned Ivies, amidst the escalating conflict with Iran, Tucker Carlson referred to Donald Trump as a “subservient” figure to Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu on the BBC, while Marjorie Taylor Greene advocated for Trump’s removal from office. Just last week, the Pew Research Center released a study indicating that most adults under 50 in both political factions now hold a “very” or “somewhat” unfavorable perception of Israel. Retrospectively, the events on America’s premier university campuses in 2023 and 2024 certainly ignited something—yet the precise nature of that outcome remains undefined.
